Rose Parade Aftermath: Cleaning Up the Trash

What’s it like cleaning up after about 1 million people?

“Hard work--and a lot of sweat,” said a weary Bobby Harris, veteran of 19 Rose Parade mop-up crews and one of a legion of Pasadena city employees pounding 5.5 miles of pavement Tuesday.

The debris left in the wake of Pasadena’s 101st annual floral extravaganza would not have been so bad were it not for an untimely storm that swept in, almost on cue, just as the Rose Bowl game was ending Monday evening.

“All the trash weighs three or four times as much because it’s wet,” the 36-year-old Harris said Tuesday as he neared his 14th hour on the job.

Not all the Dixie cups, food wrappers, empty cans and bottles had been swept up, but he and a few of his fellow Public Works Department employees had switched to the sawhorse detail.

“We got about 34,000 (street) barricades to pick up,” said Jack Bergman, 34, as he hoisted more orange-and-white planks into the bed of a city truck at the corner of Lake Avenue and Colorado Boulevard--less than halfway through the parade route.

As city employees joined rent-a-fence and rent-a-bleacher crews to dismantle the trappings of a parade route, tens of thousands of people streamed into Pasadena for Day 2 of the Tournament of Roses: the final viewing of the floats at Victory Park.

“It’s just gorgeous!” said an ecstatic Frances Mitchell, 50, of Knoxville, Tenn., whose surprise Christmas present was her first trip to the Rose Parade--and, not incidentally, her first airplane flight.

“I’ve always loved the Rose Parade, but seeing it on TV, well, you just don’t see the detail, how beautiful (the floats) are,” said Mitchell, who went to the park in Pasadena for her second glimpse of the rainbow of blooms.

A nip in the air and the rain puddles that had some in the crowd bundled in heavy coats and galoshes was no match for the 25-below-zero wind chill factor they left behind last Friday, said her husband, William Mitchell, 52.

“It’s sweat-shirt weather,” he boasted and pointed proudly to their matching orange sweat shirts bearing the emblem of the University of Tennessee, winner of Monday’s Cotton Bowl in Dallas.

From her perch on her father’s shoulders, 2 1/2-year-old Tyema Sebastian clapped her hands and shouted, “I love you monkeys!” to two mechanical simians chattering in the jungle tableaux titled “Nature’s Masterpiece” by the Bank of America.

“I used to come here when I was a kid,” said Anthony Sebastian, 29, a postal carrier who had decided that his daughter and 1 1/2-year-old son, Timothy, were old enough to enjoy the spectacle.

“I think they like the floats with the most noise,” he said, pointing to his son, who waved his arms excitedly at the cawing of the float’s mechanical birds.

Six-year-old Cheryl McClure and her 5-year-old brother, Billy, may have had the second best pair of seats Tuesday--their own wagon.

“We figured this way we’d know exactly where they were,” said their mother, Karen McClure, a Victorville dental assistant who shared towing duties with her husband, Fred, 36, a sergeant at George Air Force Base.

Across the way, Addie Voils, 68, stared through her zoom lens, waiting patiently for an unobstructed shot of Elvis Presley twirling on the state of Mississippi’s entry.

No fan of crowds, the watercolor artist from Littleton, Colo., had watched the parade on television from her son’s living room in Pasadena.

“I had to beg my husband to bring me,” said Voils, as she snapped a few more frames Tuesday in the hope of taking home a photograph or two that might bring inspiration to her painting.

About 85,000 people viewed the parked floats Monday afternoon. By the end of Tuesday, another 200,000 were expected to see them before the flower-decked behemoths lurched toward their respective homes, where most would be stripped down to await a new incarnation for the 102nd Tournament of Roses.

But while the floats were to be gone by nightfall, it would be many more days before the hundreds of bleachers erected along Orange Grove and Colorado boulevards were dismantled and trucked away.

“We have until the 22nd (of January) to get ‘em down,” said Tony Ojda, of Cypress Park, who was supervising a crew of laborers on Colorado Boulevard for one of three rental firms that had supplied the bleachers.

“It’s not bad at all today. But if it keeps raining, it will be,” he said, stepping gingerly out of the way as a forklift scooped up a stack of boards and scaffolding.

A few yards away, a pile of discarded wine bottles and soda cans, candy wrappers and plastic foam cups had eluded the first brush of clean-up crews.

But all that debris was gravy for people like Joseph Callahan, a supervisor for a city weed-abatement crew, who arrived at 4:30 a.m. Tuesday for a full overtime shift, and would work from 6 p.m. to midnight finishing up.

“I’m getting ready to buy a house, so I’m working as much as I can,” he said.

By day’s end, Pasadena city spokeswoman Carol Brown Spencer said 50 tons of trash had been collected along the parade route and another 50 tons in and around the Rose Bowl, Cleanup costs were estimated at $30,000.

“About $7,000 of that will be to replace lost barricades,” Spencer said. “Typically they lose about 70 to 100 of them a year. We think people may burn them to stay warm during the night. . . .

“But $30,000? That doesn’t seem like a big amount for cleaning up such a mess.”